Microsoft Office 365's New 'Clutter' Tool Streamlines Your Inbox

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Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella at an event announcing Microsoft Office for iPad in San Francisco.

Image: Mashable, Karissa Bell

By Karissa Bell2014-04-01 02:35:48 UTC

Microsoft unveiled a series of new features for Office 365's Outlook users, including an Android web app, and tools for decluttering your inbox and collaborating on documents.

Jeff Teper, the Redmond, Wash. company's corporate vice-president, revealed the changes on Monday at the Microsoft Exchange Conference in Austin.

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Codenamed "Clutter," the feature aims to make it easier for people to go through their inboxes by automatically separating email based on importance.

"At its heart, it intends to remove as much unimportant mail, or clutter, from a user’s inbox as possible so that a user’s inbox can, well, become their inbox again," Steve Chew, a senior product-marketing manager in the Exchange group, said in a blog post. "Leveraging the intelligence of the Office Graph, clutter looks for how 'importantly' or 'unimportantly' you treat emails, and looks for patterns behind those behaviors."

Clutter, which Chew said is still experimental, is similar to Gmail's Priority Inbox. It highlights emails identified as important, and separates unimportant emails into a different section of your inbox.

Microsoft's new tool to declutter your inbox.

Microsoft also announced new features that make it easier for people to collaborate on documents using OneDrive for Business, which officially launches Tuesday.

The new tool adds the option to send cloud-based documents stored on OneDrive as links, instead of attachments, which enables multiple people to edit the same document together in real-time. The document's owner can also manage permissions from within an email.

Teper also said Microsoft will be adding Android support to Outlook's web app; this will allow Android users to access their inboxes via Microsoft Exchange.

The company did not say exactly when the new features would be available, but that users can expect to see them "later this year."

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Topics: apps-and-software, Apps and Software, Microsoft, Office 365, microsoft outlook, Tech